Inside The Bali Plot

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According to the FBI account, Hambali was furious at the failure of the Singapore plot and used the meeting in Thailand to announce an abrupt change in strategy. His group would avoid the risky business of attacking "hard targets," those located in big, well-policed cities or sites with obvious symbolic value. Instead, the terrorists would seek places where Americans or their allies went to shop, eat or vacation. Bali was the epitome of what they were aiming for; among those killed by the Kuta bombs were an estimated 75 Australians, 22 Britons and 7 Americans. Hambali may now be in Bangkok or Pakistan. But Indonesian authorities have identified a person they claim to be the new leader of the terrorist cells within JI--Ali Ghufron, a radical Islamist from the village of Tenggulun in eastern Java. Amrozi is Ali Ghufron's younger brother.

A FAMILY BUSINESS

Tenggulun is a very religious place. In 1992 two brothers of Ali Ghufron and Amrozi founded a school there to train local youngsters in Wahhabism, one of Islam's most severely orthodox strains. Most of Tenggulun's residents follow the more moderate Islam of Nahdlatul Ulama, an Indonesian religious society. Rivalry between the two groups erupted in 1987, when the tomb of a local saint was burned down. The culprit was Amrozi.

The fifth of 13 siblings, Amrozi was always something of a black sheep. At a televised press conference after his arrest last month, he told Indonesian national police chief Da'i Bachtiar that he was "a naughty person, sir--that's what my family always say about me." Unlike his brothers, most of whom graduated from religious schools, Amrozi never got beyond junior high and was best known for roaring through Tenggulun on one of his beloved motorbikes.

Amrozi revered Ali Ghufron, who was two years older and the most devout member of the family. In the 1970s Ali Ghufron, with his brothers Ali Imron and Amin Jabir, left Tenggulun to study at Ngruki, 250 miles to the east, in a school established by Abubakar Ba'asyir, a Muslim cleric widely believed to be the spiritual leader of JI. Ba'asyir is currently detained on suspicion of being involved in the series of bombings in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta in Christmas 2000. In the mid-1980s Ali Ghufron went to study in Malaysia, and a few years later Amrozi set out to look for him. Ali Ghufron had fallen in with a group of fellow Indonesians living in Malaysia, led by Abubakar and his mentor Abdullah Sungkar, who shared poverty and a militant brand of Islam. Abubakar and Sungkar had fled Indonesia to avoid being thrown in prison by the government of President Suharto for espousing radical views.